


Forrest Buys Maggie Flowers

by TheAstronomer



Category: Lawless (2012)
Genre: Cardigans, Flowers, Forrest Bondurant being awkward, Gen, Shopping, Short One Shot, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 22:46:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16942140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomer/pseuds/TheAstronomer
Summary: Piece of light fluffery written for a prompt on Tumblr.  No smut.Forrest is awkward AF.  Wearing a cardigan.





	Forrest Buys Maggie Flowers

The big, awkward man was clearly having trouble.  Not a man in his natural environment, thought Miss Thompson.  But she waited.  He was just a lurking shape to her, she didn’t look too closely at him. Carried on bunching her flowers into posies, choosing each stem carefully, binding them together with rough twine.  Her hands were scarred and toughened by this work - for 40 years she had run the only flower stall in Franklin. 

Miss Thompson had dealt with all types of men: the diffident boys with oiled, slicked back hair, wearing their best suits and buying cheap daisies for their girls, the silver-tongued devils buying armfuls of roses for several different women, the tired husbands snatching up posies for waiting wives.  She’d never understood the power of flowers herself – their scent and colours fading almost as soon as they were cut, bought up and left to droop and dry up in vases.  It was just a business to her, no more, no less and she was not there to hand-hold men through buying a bunch of cheap blossoms for their women.

Still, she waited.  She’d let him come to her. She eyed him again, wiping her hands down on her thick oilskin apron.  He’d taken his hat off now, and turned it round and round in his big hands as he peered suspiciously at the flowers like they were his mortal enemies. Now there was slight panic in his eyes as he sidled round the buckets.  One tentative finger reached out to the petals of a bright, blousy sunflower, its head heavy with the black centre which would eventually be pitted with seeds.  There was a frown, a slight shake of the head. That’s right, thought Miss Thompson, they’re the show-offs of the flower world. He seemed the quiet sort himself.  The man cleared his throat, shuffled towards the next bucket of flowers.

‘You alright there, Mister?’ offered Miss Thompson.  She felt darned sorry for him now, how did he manage that, big rough looking critter that he was.  

‘Ma’am,’ came the rumbled reply, a polite dip of his head towards her.  Now she noticed the scar -  her sharp blue eyes didn’t miss much - a livid, pink, jagged line drawn crudely across his throat, his collar not quite hiding it.

So it was Forrest Bondurant who was hanging about her flower stall like a love-sick boy.  Forrest Bondurant, the only man to survive getting his throat cut, holding his neck together and walking himself to hospital, or so the story went. Of course, she recognised him now, even though he wasn’t in town much.

‘You need a bit of help?’ she stepped towards him, laying down her knife and twine.

He grunted, made brief eye contact.  

‘Well,’ said Miss Thompson. ‘My grandma was said to be a mind-reader, could also contact the dead and what-not, but I ain’t inherited her gift, so you're gonna have to help me out a little here.’

Forrest placed his hat carefully back on his head and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his heavy woollen cardigan.  He stared down at the ground.  

‘She was also very good with dumb animals. They all liked her.’  She never could help teasing and some folks seemed to ask for it. Forrest nodded slowly, giving nothing away. This was a man who was hard to rile, she recognised.  

‘I need some flowers.  For someone.  A woman,’ he drawled eventually, after chewing over the appropriate response for some minutes.  His hand wandered up to the ugly scar, rubbed at it.  It must itch, thought Miss Thompson.  She’d cut herself bad a few times with her blade when she was trimming flower stems and knew well that part of the healing process when it was all she could do to not scratch the damn skin right off.

‘Ok, now we’re cooking.  A lady you say?’

‘Hm, yes ma’am, she’s a lady.’

Miss Thompson knew fine well it would be Maggie Beauford, the woman who was helping out up at the Bondurant place. Maggie sure as hell wouldn’t know everyone’s names around here yet, but they all knew hers alright.  A graceful looking girl, always in some silky looking clothes.  Kind of delicate and pale with soft red hair.  Miss Thompson had seen her wandering around town, in and out of the few shops Franklin offered to visitors.

Still, she couldn’t resist: ‘What does this lady look like, maybe that’ll help us choose the right flowers.’

Well, did that ever put the cat amongst the pigeons.  Miss Thompson struggled to keep her grin suppressed as Forrest’s face went through several shades of red and eventually faded to a delicate pink along the edge of his ears.

‘Well’, he began slowly, a strained and faraway expression on his face.  He held up a hand level with his shoulder. ‘Maybe about yay high.’  He paused, his mouth set in a grim line. ‘Kinda skinny, but soft too.’  His mouth began to slowly relax into a very small smile as he warmed to the subject. ‘Red hair.  Not ginger, kinda…’

‘Auburn?’  

‘That what they call it? Yeah.  She’s…’ Here was the longest pause as Forrest dug deep into his vocabulary.  ‘Classy.’

‘Is she now.  What these flowers for?  Anniversary?  Birthday?’

‘No ma’am.  She did something for me.  She saved my life.’

‘Flowers for saving your life, eh?  That a fair exchange you think?’

That one hit home and there was a flash of annoyance in his guarded eyes.

‘Prob’ly not, no.’  His jaw was set and tense.

‘It’s a start though.  It’ll do as a start.’

Miss Thompson picked up ten slender stems of roses.  They were a delicate apricot, their blooms a complicated whorl, tight and compact in the centre, stems the darkest green, leaves shining and leathery.  Beautiful but tough. That would do it. Forrest took them in his big paw, held them to his nose briefly.

‘They smell good.’ he said simply.  His face opened for a second, a split second of light, another of his shy smiles.  He gave her the money without complaining about it, like most did.  

‘There now.  There’s your starter, Mr Bondurant.  Maybe you need to take her dancing next.  She looks like a woman who likes to dance.’

He showed no surprise at her revealing she knew both him and Maggie, only called back over his shoulder as he walked away: ‘I don’t dance Ma’am.’


End file.
